"It has always been," H.von Treitschke tells us, "the weary, spiritless, and exhausted ages which have played with the dream of perpetual peace." Everyone will, within certain limits, admit that the endeavours to diminish the dangers of war and to mitigate the sufferings which war entails are justifiable.

It is an incontestable fact that war temporarily disturbs industrial life, interrupts quiet economic development, brings widespread misery with it, and emphasizes the primitive brutality of man.

It is therefore a most desirable consummation if wars for trivial reasons should be rendered impossible, and if efforts are made to restrict the evils which follow necessarily in the train of war, so far as is compatible with the essential nature of war.

All that the Hague Peace Congress has accomplished in this limited sphere deserves, like every permissible humanization of war, universal acknowledgment.

But it is quite another matter if the object is to abolish war entirely, and to deny its necessary place in historical development.
This aspiration is directly antagonistic to the great universal laws which rule all life.